Sorcerer's Luck (21 page)

“There we go! I've heard about those. You can control them from your laptop.” Tor smiled
at me, a lop-sided twist of his mouth. “Nanny to a bear cub.”

“Well, when I took the job I told my friends I was an au pair to a bear.”

Tor's smile disappeared. “I'm surprised that you'd want to stay with a freak like me.”

“Don't say that! Don't call yourself that!”

“Why not?”

 “Because I love you. Besides, I'm a freak too, if you're one.”

 Tor caught my hand in both of his. “I love you, too,” he said. “And I always will.”

He raised my hand to his mouth and kissed my fingers, then let me go.

“Always” is easy to say. Deep in my mind a knot of fear remained, like a thorn that's
worked its way into your body through the skin: what if he got tired me of me
one day and turned me out to die? When I remembered his joke about concubines,
the thorn stabbed me near my heart.

That night the thorn worked its way into my dreams and turned them to a nightmare. Once
again I stood on a night-time bridge over dark water, but this time I had no
idea where I was. I turned and tried to see lights in the distance. None shone.
I looked down and saw in a bubble of bluish light a dead woman floating in the
water. At first I thought she was the woman I'd been, Magda, but she had long
blond hair that tangled around her neck, as if she'd been hanged in her own
hair. Her blue eyes bulged out from the strangling and seemed to stare right at
me.

“No!” I said. “No no no!” The last ‘no' rose to a wail and woke me.

Tor had turned on the lamp on the end table by our bed. He sat up cross-legged next to
me. I lay still and trembled.

“Another nightmare?” he said.

“Yeah. The water again and a woman's corpse.”

“You need to start thinking about drawing these dreams. And why you don't want to.”

“I just don't.” My voice whined like a stubborn child's. I took a deep breath. “They
frighten me.”

“Well, yeah, that's what nightmares do.” He smiled briefly. “Maya, you've got to start
looking at this stuff.”

“What do you mean, stuff?”

“Whatever the nightmares represent. You won't know until you look at them.”

I lifted a hand and watched it shake. He caught it between both of his.

“I bet you know what I'm going to say next,” he said.

“Yeah. I've got a talent for sorcery.”

He grinned, kissed my fingertips, and laid my hand gently on my midriff.

“Is that the big mysterious meaning?” I continued. “I don't see how these nightmares
could be telling me that. They're so horrible.”

“I've got no idea what they mean. You're the only one who knows. But that's what being a
vitki's all about, knowing the meanings of things. Knowing what comes out of
your own mind. Knowing the difference between that and things in the outer
world. That's why I want to know what I really look like when the bjarki
dominates.”

I understood him well enough. I needed to draw the images from my mind in order
to see them clearly. I feared them enough to resist doing it, but if he had the
guts to let me record him after he transformed, I'd have to summon the courage
to draw my dreams. Tor got out of bed, put on his jeans, and walked over to the
eastern window. He opened the curtains and let in the pale light of dawn.

“Do you feel the élan?” he said.

“No. I never can unless it's coming from a human body.”

He unlatched the window and pushed it open. “How about now?”

The air smelled fresh and pure. I took a deep breath. “It's just air. Nice, though.”

For a moment he stood at the open window, then turned and stretched out his arms
toward me. The flow of élan swept over me like the perfume of a thousand roses.
I fed, drank it in, gasped and fed again until I could feel the energy swirling
around me, a tangible stroke along my naked skin. I caught it in my hands,
wafted it toward my face, and gulped it down.

“Feel better?” he said.

“Much, yeah. Thanks.”

“Huh. It's like my body's the athanor, and it cooks what you need to eat. Interesting.”

Tears threatened my eyes. “Tor, if you ever get tired of me, you won't let me die,
will you? You won't make me just go back to stealing bits of other people's
lives, I mean. It's not enough. I know that now. It's just not enough.”

“What?” He gaped at me, then laughed with an uneasy chuckle. “First, I haven't gotten
tired of you in a hundred and sixty years. Second, even if I did go crazy and
get tired of you, no, I'd never just let you die. I'll swear it on the runes.
Okay?”

“Okay. I just wondered. I—” My voice choked.

He strode over to the bed and sat down on the edge beside me.

“Let me tell you what you mean to me,” Tor said. “I'm a lot like my grandfather,
y'know. All the energy he put into making money I put into sorcery. I don't
want to turn into a cold-hearted bastard like he was. I never loved anything or
anyone as much as I love the runes until I found you again. Not even my dad,
and I did love him. So whatever heart I've got belongs to you. It's like you're
my heart, or at least, you keep it safe for me. You're my life, Maya, in a kind
of weird way. My soul, I guess I mean. Without you I wouldn't have one.”

I sat up and turned into his embrace. He pulled me close, kissed my forehead, my eyes,
my mouth, while his gentle hands stroked my back.

“Why are you trembling?” he said.

“Because I don't know if I can live up to that.”

“You can. Don't worry. Just be who you are.”

He kissed me open-mouthed and passionately. I relaxed into his love-making, but later I
remembered what he'd told me.
Just be who you are.
But who was I? My
surrender to loving Tor had changed everything. If I was no longer the vampire,
no longer the brave girl-artist fighting poverty and a fatal disease—then I had
no idea at all.

“I've got two samples of the language now,” Tor said. “The runes on the gold ornament and
the note from the Rime Jötnar. They're both written with the elder futhark.
Which helps.”

“It's easier to read than the younger one?”

“It represents more sounds. Less ambiguity.”

We were sitting at the breakfast bar after a late lunch. Tor had brought out the
rubbings he'd made from the gold ornament he kept in the safe. He laid the note
from the Frost Giants next to them so I could compare the two. The style of the
carved runes differed from those drawn in ink on the note, thanks to the
difference in the tools used to make them, but I could pick out the letters
nonetheless. My mind had begun to organize and process the vast body of lore
that Tor had given me to study.

“One problem,” Tor said, “is that the Jötnar can't spell worth shit. They're not
real bright, y'know.”

“I gathered that from the legends.”

“And the other is that I don't know this language. I can pick out roots. I know Old
Norse, and German, too, and a lot about Gothic, not that I'd claim to be able
to speak it.” He grinned at me. “Tolkien was the last person alive fluent in
Gothic. And the first one in about four hundred years.”

I had to smile at that. “Why do you know so many languages?” I said.

“My college major was Germanic languages and literature. That includes Old Norse and the
daughter languages. I need them all for the rune work. That's where I met JJ,
in one of our basic linguistics courses.”

“Makes sense, yeah.”

“Do you see these rows of dots?” Tor pointed at the rubbing from the gold ornament's back. “They're
set up in pairs, so they could be coded runes. There's a system for that. So
you can see that the whole thing's a riddle, or maybe a set of riddles.”

The riddles began to obsess him. He took to spending longer and longer hours down in his
workshop. At times through the heater vents I could hear him chanting over the
rune scripts as if a ritual might help unlock their meaning. While he worked, I
passed my time online. I watched back episodes of my favorite TV shows—I
streamed them on my laptop and used my earbuds so Tor couldn't hear what I was
doing. I also caught up with everyone I knew on Facebook. I did make sure to
study the books Tor had given me as well. I found the entire Scandinavian
culture fascinating, partly because it was so different from my mother's
South-east Asian heritage and partly, of course, because I'd fallen in love
with Tor.

Now and then he gave me “bulletins from the front,” as he called them.

“I've gotten a few more words here and there, after looking through every damned dictionary
I own,” he told me at dinner one night. “Thief, wolf, property, and a couple of
verbs, I think they're verbs, anyway. This language may be older than
Proto-Gothic. The only thing I know for sure is that the two languages are the
same. The one on the note and the one on the gold ornament, I mean.”

“Maybe it's the language the Jötnar speak.”

“You're brilliant. That could be it, sure. It probably never dawned on the fuckers that
I didn't know how to read their lousy language.”

“The kid called you a sorcerer. He probably thinks you know everything.”

“Yeah, that's our reputation, all right.”

“Although he called Nils the silly sorcerer.”

“Occasionally the giants have flashes of intelligence, then.” Tor grinned at me. “But what in
hell do they want out of me?”

“I dunno. Maybe they need you to cast a spell for them.”

“Nah, their women can do that.”

“Wait a minute, if the language is the same on that ornament thing, maybe they think it
belongs to them. Maybe that's what they want.”

Tor stared wide-eyed for a long moment. “Shit,” he said. “Yeah, that could be it.”

“Then all you have to do is give it back to them.”

“Why would I do that? It must be something really valuable. Magically, I mean. If it was
just a lump of gold, sure. I'd give it back in a minute, but—”

“Tor! They're dangerous. They're frost giants.”

“Yeah. So? I'm not giving that thing away until I know what it means. What do you think I
am, a coward?”

“No, but I am.”

He laughed in a peal of genuine humor. “It's not you they'd go after,” he said. “Don't
worry about it.”

I argued for at least fifteen minutes, that day, but he never gave in or even really
listened. I was learning that “stubborn” is too weak a word to describe a man
like Tor. He'd smelled magic the way a bear smells honey and ignores the
swarming bees.

It was a couple of days later that my credit card bills arrived along with the rest of
the mail. Tor refused to let me look at them, which told me that yes, I'd been
assessed some hefty penalties. Since he kept all his financial papers and
records downstairs, he took the bills with him when he went down to his
workroom. When he came up for lunch, he told me that he'd paid off the
accounts.

“One of the things that came today,” he said, “is your new credit card.” He handed it me. “It's
on my account. Go ahead and get anything you need.” He grinned. “Well, maybe
not diamond necklaces or things in that price range.”

“Huh! I wouldn't know what to do with a diamond necklace.”

“Okay, good. Just don't try to use your old cards. I cancelled them.”

“You did what?”

“You won't need them anymore. There's a real high limit on the card I just gave you. It
should cover whatever you want to spend.”

“But hey! I need cards in my own name.”

“Why?” Tor appeared to be sincerely puzzled. “Besides, your credit score really sucks.”

I winced, because I knew he was right. “But you could have at least asked me before you
cancelled them. I mean, how did you cancel them? You don't have my online passwords,
do you?”

“No.” He gave me a sad smile. “I called them on the phone. The old-fashioned way. I was
transferring the payments over at the same time. Of course they did what I
wanted.”

I set my hands on my hips and glared at him. He heaved a sigh.

“Okay, yeah,” he said. “I should have asked you first. Sorry.”

He did not sound sincere. I went on glaring at him. “I can't believe,” I said, “that they
didn't ask you for the answer to the security question.”

“They did. What was your mother's first name? Kusuma.”

“How did you know that?”

He just smiled. I made a squealing sound of sheer rage that had no effect on him
whatsoever. I considered continuing to argue, but I remembered his discussion
of what “husband” meant. Waste of breath, I told myself.

 Besides, I knew what to do. I'd wait a couple of weeks until all the credit agencies
registered the final payment on the old cards. At that point I could get a
charge card from some fancy department store. They hand them out like candy,
especially when you have a new address and don't put down your middle initial—that
way you might luck out and not show up on the credit check as the deadbeat you
were. Buy something small every month for say six months and pay it off every
time. Getting a real card again is a snap.

When Tor returned to the library room downstairs, I called Cynthia and asked if she
wanted to go shopping with me. I needed new underwear and wanted to hit the
mall.

“I'd better not,” Cynthia said. “I've got too much stuff to do around here. I'll admit to
being glad of the week off so I can catch up. I need to debug our wireless
set-up. Jim keeps insisting that the old router's okay, so something else is
wrong And I've got to clean out the storage area. It's full of junk.”

“That's one thing about always being so broke,” I said. “I've never owned enough things to
have them be a nuisance.”

“Well, if you stay with Tor, that could change.”

“Maybe so, yeah. Say, if you're busy during the day, do you guys want to get together for
dinner?”

“That's a good idea. What about tomorrow?”

“Sounds good. I'll run it by Tor.”

Cynthia and I chatted about restaurants while I went downstairs to interrupt him at his
brooding over the runes. When I asked him about going out with my friends, he
agreed.

“It'll be good to have something fun to look forward to,” he said. “This project's
driving me nuts.”

As I went back upstairs, Cynthia and I arranged the time and place. After we clicked off,
I drove down to the mall. I was going to pick up some of my usual cheap
French-cut panties at the low-budget department store, but a fancy lingerie
store was having a sale. Even at fifty percent off, their goods still cost more
than my usual brand. I debated, but I had the card Tor had just given me. The
fabric in the expensive underwear was so smooth, so light and soft. The same
soft cloth covered the elastic band so it wouldn't chafe like it did on the
cheap ones. I gave in and bought them. I also bought some fancy black lace and
satin panties and a bustier, the kind that aren't meant to be worn under your
clothes.

As I walked back through the mall to get out to the parking lot, I kept looking around me.
What if Nils had come after me at the mall again? With my bindrune pendant I
felt safe from his prying magical eyes, but what if he'd happened to be driving
around and seen Gretel? She stood out even on a crowded freeway. Keep your eyes
moving, I told myself. Watch for illusions. All those years of hunting for
people whose élan I could tap stood me in good stead. I had the habits of a
hunter, but they could also keep me from being prey. As it was, I never saw any
trace of Nils nor felt anyone looking me over.

On the way home I stopped at the post office and put in an application for a post office
box. Once I got my new credit card, Tor wouldn't have to know about it—or about
anything else I had sent there.

When I returned to the flat, Tor had already come upstairs. He was sitting on the
couch looking morose. He had a book in his lap, an academic looking work with a
title in some Scandinavian language.

“What's wrong?” I said. “The translation?”

“Yeah.” He laid the book down on the coffee table. “Come here and kiss me. I need a hug.”

Coming from him that cliché made me laugh. “I can do better than that,” I said. “Wait till
you see what I bought.”

When I held up the shopping bag, he must have recognized the label, because he grinned. “Gonna
model it for me?” he said.

“You bet. I'll just be in the bedroom changing.”

He stayed out of the bedroom until I'd stripped and put on the black satin panties, the
kind you don't have to take off. When he came in, the look he gave me made me
forget about adding the bustier. He strode over, caught me by the shoulders and
kissed me. All I could think about was getting into bed. Getting him undressed
seemed to take forever. His lovemaking, as opposed to the magical sex, was
sweet and warm even when he was totally aroused. With my other boyfriends, I
always felt that when we had sex they were taking something from me that they
considered theirs. Tor made me feel like I was giving him beautiful gifts. He
never said anything as goopy as “thank you,” but his smile, when we finished,
and the way he kissed my face, so gently, the way he stroked my hair, let me
know what he felt.

We made love twice that day. When we were done, Tor got up and dressed. He muttered
something about going downstairs just as I fell asleep. I woke up about an hour
later and took a shower. I brought the panties in with me to rinse them out and
hung them over the shower door to dry. Once I'd dressed, I went down to see
what he was doing.

I found him sitting at the high wooden table. Big books, some of them leather-bound
and smelling like mold, lay open in a messy litter around his spread-out
papers. Tor looked up from his work and grinned at me.

“Sex must help me think,” he said. “I've unraveled a piece of this.”

I came over and perched on the tall stool next to him. He pointed to the rubbing of the
back of the gold ornament, where a long row of runes, set off by slightly
unsteady lines, formed a sort of belt around its edge. He used his index
fingers to isolate a particular set of runes.

“Pain at the full moon.” Tor announced.

“That's all it says?”

“No. That's all I understand.” His smile disappeared. “Shit, the full moon's on its way,
isn't it? Only a few days now, and I'll have to make the damned change.”

I laid a comforting hand on his arm.

“It'll be worse, this time,” he said, “wondering if you'll just run out on me after you
see what I turn into.”

“I'm not going to do that.”

“You'll be here when I come back?”

“I promise. Are you sorry we're planning on recording it? We could wait another month.”

“No. Let's get it over with. I'm more worried because of Nils. When I'm in bjarki form, I
won't be able to fend off an attack. Maybe you should just leave the flat. Go
stay with your girlfriends where you'll be safe.”

“No! I won't leave you. What if he sets the house on fire or something like that? I'll
have to get you out of here.”

“There you'll be, out on the street with a dancing bear. Too bad you're not a gypsy in
this life. You could get me a red fez and a vest with bells on it.”

“And one of those special bicycles.”

He grinned, and I laughed, but the worry bit hard underneath the joke.

I left him to his obsession. He returned to the upper flat near dinner time and joined me
in the kitchen, where I was pouring myself a glass of cola.